Online middlemen cut to the chase

You are a business trying to expand your market, you want to attract new customers by discounting. New businesses springing up online play the middleman to bring buyers and sellers together and to make a buck for themselves.

There are many ways to cut a deal.

The trend has been helped by the social media trend. Sites such as six-month old ourdeal.com.au and one-year-old JumpOnIt.com arrange deals with merchants designed to deliver not only a target market faster, but one that brings repeat business.

They pull in buyers by offering discounts – that is they inform members by email of daily, usually discounted deals such as restaurant meals, beauty and health treatments, outdoor activities and educational courses that they can buy online.

The sites have pages for members in different parts of the country and tailor their deals based on their knowledge of their interests.

OurDeal has launched in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane and soon will be on the Gold Coast. Members are typically female (65 per cent), aged between 25 and 44.

JumpOnIt, which targets affluent inner-city consumers, has a similar presence that founder Colin Fabig says will expand to the Gold Coast in a few months.

Like OurDeal, female subscribers outnumber male.

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JumpOnIt has boosted its subscriber base by creating pages on Facebook such as “I love Sydney" and “I love Melbourne" that ask viewers for favourite restaurants, for example, and has attracted 500,000 fans. These have been a hugely successful avenue for promoting its deals.

These dealmakers are doing more than just promoting discount opportunities, they are driving unique bargains.

OurDeal arranged recently to give 150 members the chance to buy a voucher that would give them 50 per cent off food and beverages at the Raw Bar Japanese restaurant in Bondi. OurDeal paid the restaurant in advance for the offer less its fee.

The offer sold out within 24 hours. Founder Julian Holman, pictured above, says that making the offer exclusive, rather than selling vouchers to hundreds of people that could be redeemed over an extended period, could tax the merchant’s resources.

“Our business is all about the merchants," he says. “We’re about bringing a good-quality database of members to merchants."